Wednesday, March 20, 2013

"ArtScroll and Sephardic Judaism" by David Shasha

Outside
the Orthodox Jewish community, the role of the religious publisher Mesorah
Publications, better known as ArtScroll, is not well-known. Those
Jews who would not consider themselves Ultra-Orthodox utilize prayer books,
Bibles and rabbinic works published under the ArtScroll imprint barely
understanding the ideological and socio-cultural provenance of the publisher
and its polemical aims.

Without
getting into the minute details of the lengthy history and evolution of
ArtScroll, it would behoove us to understand its place in the modern Jewish
world and how that place has been circumscribed by the contemporary role of the
Ultra-Orthodox Lithuanian-style Yeshivah world in this culture.

Many
Jews would be surprised to learn that the great European Yeshivahs were
endangered in America. It was by no
means a secure fact of the re-emergence of this religious culture. The giants of the old world Yeshivahs such as
Mir, Telz and others were transplanted in the US during the post-War period as
fledgling institutions; a far cry from their robust posture in pre-War
Europe. A heroic effort took place among
the Orthodox refugees and their heirs here in America to recreate these
institutions in a new and often inhospitable home.

As
we know, American Jewry split off into new and acrimonious factions along the
denominational lines that emerged in the Ashkenazi community in Europe.The first stirrings of Reform and of new
secular identities in Europe gave birth to the new denominations here in
America.

Orthodoxy
was seen as late the 1950s as just one of many Jewish denominations and not the
one that was thought to have the best chance of regeneration here in the
States. In point of fact, the burgeoning
Conservative movement, which prided itself on Halakhic adaptation to the mores
of the new country, was seen as the Jewish denomination most likely to capture
the majority of American Jews.

The
Orthodox lived in a world outside the highly mobile American Jewish
mainstream. Successful in placing its
beloved rabbis at the apex of its emerging Yeshivah system, American Orthodoxy
was itself split into two factions: There was the traditional world of the
Ultra-Orthodox Yeshivot and there was a splinter movement, led by Rabbi Joseph
Soloveitchik, which proclaimed itself “Modern” Orthodox. There has been a tremendous amount of
friction between these Orthodox groups that has a good deal of bearing on any
discussion of the ArtScroll phenomenon.

Modern
Orthodoxy began to play a major role in the larger Jewish world while the
Yeshivah world of Ultra-Orthodoxy moved to the periphery. As we can see today, Modern Orthodoxy was in
a no-win position vis-à-vis the larger Jewish community. Bound by the rigidity of Ashkenazi Orthodoxy,
its “modern” variant was constantly wavering between the “secular” world which
had little use for the tenets of Jewish Orthodoxy and the strictly “frum” world
of Orthodox Judaism.

The
Ultra-Orthodox did not suffer from such schizophrenia. In fact, one of the primary beliefs of the
Ultra-Orthodox was that the outside world was both alien and hostile. No attempts were made to make Judaism
compatible with the modern world. The
Modern Orthodox were forced to compete with non-Orthodox movements which were
Halakhically and philosophically flexible and with the rigid nature of Orthodoxy
which rejected science and the humanities as being an alien accretion within
the Jewish world as it was understood and taught in the Yeshivah world.

The
Modern Orthodox movement did not produce a figure who could match the authority
of Rabbi Soloveitchik. The influence of
the “Rav” – as he is affectionately known in the Modern Orthodox world – is
immense and cannot be overstated. In his
singularity he is to be contrasted with the many Ultra-Orthodox authorities who
embodied a vigorous Ultra-Orthodox “pluralism” that does not imply a plurality
of opinions, but a numerical plurality of its many Sages.

On
matters of doctrine and ritual observance – matters that now went hand in hand
for the Orthodox adept – the rabbis of this hermetic world began to create an
American-style consensus where norms were established and clear rules
codified. In America, the Ultra-Orthodox
established something like a political party that had its own rules and its own
partisan interests that it held fast to.

And
over the course of a few decades, with many prestigious seats in New York City,
Lakewood, New Jersey, Philadelphia and Baltimore to name the most important,
this Yeshivah world had coalesced into a strongly unified phenomenon. In this period, as I have said, norms were
laid down and new communities grew up within a standardized set of behaviors
and lifestyle patterns. Yeshivah-style
Judaism was a clearly perceptible phenomenon in spite of the fact that in the
two largest centers of Jewish life in the world – America and Israel – it had
little demographic impact. Then, as now,
the vast majority of American and Israeli Jews were not Orthodox and had no
interest in becoming Orthodox.

Here
is where the significance of ArtScroll as an extension of Jewish Orthodoxy
comes in. The publishing house was the
first and most successful English-language vehicle to promote and articulate
the values of the Yeshivah world. Many
of its publications were devoted to the furthering of a Jewish pedagogy that
was now highly contested territory.
After having done a quietly impressive job in the 1950s and 60s to enter
the ranks of teachers in Jewish Day Schools – jobs that were low-paying, but
seen by the Ultra-Orthodox as a necessary means to achieve the end of bringing
American Jews to its brand of Orthodoxy – the Yeshivah graduates began to look
at the role of print culture in the American Jewish world.

Until
this point, the primary national organization entrusted to publish Jewish books
was the Jewish Publication Society of America.
This organization, like many others, was founded in Philadelphia in a
resolutely Sephardic environment. Many
of the founding members and editors of the JPS were students or followers of
the great Rabbi Sabato Morais and used their power to promote his agenda of
Sephardic Rabbinic Humanism. So in
looking at the JPS catalog from the beginning of its ministry at the dawn of
the 20th century we see an especial emphasis on the literary
classics of the Sephardim. Of course, it
would be superfluous to state that the JPS gave birth to the most accurate
English translation of the Hebrew Bible, but its reliance on the Sephardi
classics made it a central part of the older tradition of scholarship in the
Anglo-Jewish world.

ArtScroll
was in no way an attempt to compete with the JPS. In fact, the very founding of the institution
displays a complexity that mirrors the changes in the Ashkenazi Orthodox
world. In the early stages of the
project, ArtScroll attempted to solidify its ties with the Modern Orthodox
world. But once people like Rabbi Norman
Lamm of Yeshiva University rebuffed the union, it resolutely rejected the
scholarly principles of the JPS editorial model and moved Right-ward. The purpose of the ArtScroll book was to
provide in clear and articulate English the ideology of the Yeshivahs and of Ultra-Orthodoxy.

In
its Bible commentaries and translations, the ArtScroll approach was to define
the literal meaning of the text as completely in harmony with the rabbinic
approach. But not only this: As the
rabbinic canon was deeply multilayered and complex, the ArtScroll approach was
one of a forced harmonization.

The
most notable example of this is in the ArtScroll edition of the Song of
Songs.

A
notoriously problematic book of the Hebrew Bible, the Song was parsed in many
different ways in the rabbinic tradition.
As a book of profane erotic poetry, the Song was re-read in rabbinic
circles as a mystic conversation between God and man. In the ArtScroll version of the Song of
Songs, the original text is completely recalibrated to reflect this reading –
even in the translation, the terms used are those of the non-literal, or
Midrashic reading.

This
is a point that is well-known in Orthodox circles, but not so clear to the
Jewish community and the world at large.

ArtScroll
is synonymous with a style of reading that affirms a univocal interpretation
imposed on the text out of the panoply of rabbinic commentary.

Over
and above this, perhaps the greatest achievement of ArtScroll has been its
massive edition of the Babylonian Talmud.
Relying on the Ashkenazi Pilpul tradition, ArtScroll’s Talmud is an
attempt to codify the view of Rashi and Tosafot into the gargantuan textual
construct that is the Talmud. Hitherto
understood as massive and difficult set of documents that could only be parsed
by the greatest of Jewish scholars, the Talmud was now brought into the hands
of the Orthodox masses.

Just
to keep this in perspective, with the exception of the Soncino Talmud – an
edition that is not based on critical readings of manuscripts, but is a simply reprint
and translation (again, often based on the readings of Rashi) of the standard
editions of the Talmud that are widely circulated – there has not been a
critical edition of the Talmud produced by the modern academy. In addition, with all the scholarship that
has been done on Jewish texts from the Bible onwards, it must be noted that
there is not a complete scholarly edition of the Talmud in English. And like the Soncino edition, the Hebrew
translation and commentary of Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz is conspicuously a product
of Orthodoxy.

Having
completely rejected any form of Jewish
Orthodoxy that is not in line with the uniformly accepted standards of the
Yeshivah world, ArtScroll found itself supremely capable of delivering a new
edition of the Talmud that would find favor with the Ultra-Orthodox consensus
and which would validate its vision of Judaism in contemporary America – and
the rest of the world.

Having
devoted so much of its attention and energies to the production of the many
dozens of volumes that would be needed to complete the project of the Talmud in
English translation, ArtScroll also developed many side-projects that would in
effect speak to the wider masses of Orthodox Jews. Beyond primary texts such as the Siddur, the
Bible and the rabbinic canon, ArtScroll developed a series of hagiographical
titles that spoke to moral matters, the history of the Jewish people and to the
articulation of the mindset of the Yeshivah world in a simple and palatable
manner.

Moving
into our discussion of the book Aleppo: City of Scholars by Rabbi David
Sutton which forms the basis of the analysis of Zvi Zohar’s article in this
special edition of the newsletter, we should also note a number of other things
as well:

The
Sephardic world, as I have repeated many times, began to abandon its religious
and literary heritage in the post-War period.
The Sephardic community in America never established a single rabbinical
seminary in its sojourn here. After the
death of Rabbi Sabato Morais who, along with Henry Pereira-Mendes, established
the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York as a non-denominational seminary
for the training of rabbis, there was no other Sephardic figure who even
attempted to establish such a training ground for the promulgation of Sephardic
rabbis.

Though
institutions such as Porat Yosef existed in Israel and a few others in the Arab
world prior to 1948, in the United States there is not a single rabbinical
seminary devoted to training Sephardi rabbis in the classical Sephardic
tradition.

The
rabbis of the Sephardic community were either imported from Israel, or went to
one or another of the Ashkenazi Orthodox institutions. And while the flagship seminary of the Modern
Orthodox world, Rabbi Isaac Elhanan Seminary at Yeshiva University, served as
the training ground for a number of rabbis in the New York area Sephardic
community, it was the Ultra-Orthodox Yeshivahs that have increasingly served as
the ones from which Sephardic rabbis have received their ordination.

Aleppo: City of Scholars is the first substantial
product of the marriage of Sephardic culture with that of the
Ultra-Orthodox. Rabbi David Sutton would
appear uniquely well-positioned for this role as he married the daughter of
Rabbi Nosson Sherman, the head of the Arstcroll publishing house. Having already produced a voluminous
coffee-table size edition of the Passover Haggadah a few years ago, Rabbi
Sutton has clearly shown his affinity to the Yeshivah style and views it as
completely compatible with the Syrian-Sephardic tradition.

Zvi
Zohar’s supremely expert analysis of Aleppo: City of Scholars shows us
the often complex and counterintuitive ways in which this shidduch has
been accomplished. Taking as its primary
source the Hebrew work – well known to cognoscenti of the Syrian rabbinic
tradition – Likdoshim Asher Ba-Aretz, Rabbi Sutton produces a
“translation” of the work along the standard lines of the ArtScroll model. Underlying the book is a pronounced adherence
to the values and codes of the Ashkenazi world of Ultra-Orthodoxy.

This
adherence is almost militant in nature.
It serves, as Zohar correctly argues, to transform the facts of the
older tradition and put in its place a new amalgam of religious and
socio-cultural values that mark Aleppo as a variant of the shtetls of Eastern
Europe that serve as the model of Ultra-Orthodoxy.

Reading
Zvi Zohar’s comprehensive and nuanced article we learn that the Ultra-Orthodox
model is one that is foreign to the Syrian-Sephardic tradition whose beliefs
and tenets reflect a very different model of Jewish self-understanding.

By
citing numerous examples from the literary texts of the Middle Eastern rabbis
themselves – a matter that Zohar has carefully studied and written about
extensively in his many books and articles on the subject – he is able to show
us how the ArtScroll-ization of Aleppo works.
He shows us the scholarly means by which Aleppo: City of Scholars
serves to transform an ancient tradition and how it forces that tradition to
comport with the values and mores of contemporary Ashkenazi Ultra-Orthodoxy as
it has been articulated in the American Yeshivot and by ArtScroll.

The article teaches us that there is a battle going
on for the authenticity of past rabbinical traditions. The battleground of this fight is strewn with
contested discussions of historical texts and legal rulings that have been
parsed and re-parsed within the walls of the Yeshivah – a place that has been
ruled by Ashkenazi interests. This means
that Sephardi rabbis trained at Yeshiva University will be uniquely incapable
of arguing the point with Rabbi Sutton – and so has been the current situation
here in Brooklyn.

The rabbis of the Syrian-Sephardic community in the
New York area have been publicly silent regarding the publication of Aleppo: City of Scholars because they have not been trained in the texts of the
Syrian-Sephardic rabbinical tradition.
This silence is exacerbated by the general lack of interest and often of
sheer disdain for the Sephardic heritage displayed by the Modern Orthodox rabbis
of the community. Though these same
rabbis are often quite hostile to Ultra-Orthodoxy and to ArtScroll, when it
comes to the subject matter of Rabbi David Sutton’s book they provide their
Synagogues and students with a blank.

In the Syrian community – believe it or not – there
is an almost complete ignorance and obliviousness on the question of the
rabbinical giants of the past.

So when Aleppo: City of
Scholars was first published, I went out and had a copy of
the book sent to Zvi Zohar who has worked with me at the Center for Sephardic
Heritage on creating some consciousness of the Sephardic tradition in our
community. That a person outside the
community had to be drafted in order to provide a “traditional” response to the
book is something that speaks to the corrupt nature of the community and its
relinquishing of its personal responsibility for preserving its very own
traditions.

Having said this, I believe that Professor Zohar’s
article will serve not only the Syrian-Sephardic community as a primary
resource in trying to understand the problems posed by ArtScroll, but will also
assist Jews more generally to better understand the place that ArtScroll has
carved out for itself in contemporary Jewish life.

Having seen the ongoing Haredization of the Jewish
world – here in the US as well as in Europe and especially in Israel – Zvi
Zohar’s article will serve the Jewish reader as a vital resource in coming to
terms with the ways in which rabbinical tradition is parsed and understood in
our Synagogues and schools of learning.

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